UK regulator Ofcom has just released comprehensive figures in its annual communications report, with revenue for the industry as a whole up 4% to £51.2 billion ($95.8 billion) for 2007, with monthly household expenditure falling 1.8% to £93.63 ($175) driven by a 6% reduction in fixed telecom spend and a 4% drop in broadband pricing. There was wider availability of both broadband and digital radio and average broadband speeds are heading towards 5.9 Mbps and unbundled rivals to British Telecom are available at 82.6% of all phone exchanges, while 58% of homes now have broadband.
Digital television penetration rose by 7.5% to 87%, and is just as common now in UK homes as a fixed phone line, driven by the adoption of the DVB-T based Freeview, in 63% of homes.
But so far only 8.3 million DAB digital radio sets have been sold with an additional 2.5 million this year so digital radio remains slow to take off.
Mobile telephony accounts for 40% of time spent using telecoms and is attributed to a simple increase in use rather than rather than substitution of fixed voice.
Older people spend significantly more time than the UK average using key media. In 2007 the over-65s spent 83 more minutes a day watching television and 20 minutes longer listening to the radio. Those with an internet connection spent 30 minutes longer online per day than the UK average. Older people email, IM and are in chat rooms and do less transactions, online reading of news and reading and contributing comments to weblogs.
However, older people remain much lower users of mobile phones with only 7% of users aged over 65 making a mobile call every day.
The UK’s advertising market grew by 6.3% to £14.9 billion ($28 billion) in 2007, the largest growth rate for three years and the first year in which growth has outstripped inflation since 2005 with most of the growth coming from internet advertising, up to £2.8 billion ($5.25 billion), more than the combined net advertising revenues of the four most popular broadcast TV channels and as much as all outdoor and magazine advertising spend combined. However, newspapers still attract more advertising than any other medium in the UK.
Some 23% of homes own a digital video recorder (DVR), up from 15% last year and 88% of DVR owners claim that they usually fast-forward through commercial breaks.
Mobile broadband emerged in 2008 as an increasingly popular means of accessing the internet. The five mobile network operators have all begun to target their mobile broadband offers at residential consumers, and while the subscriber base is relatively low, it is growing fast. There were over 500,000 new connections in the five months from February 2008, with 133,000 connections in June alone.